


America Needs Work

by Chrissy Amber (chrissyamber)



Category: Non-Fiction - Fandom
Genre: Logical Fallacies, Other, Science
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-08
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-03-28 13:04:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13904601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chrissyamber/pseuds/Chrissy%20Amber
Summary: There are misconceptions and out right lies that are keeping America from moving forward and reaching a new glory, and this book is an attempt to illustrate some basic concepts that are required for a functioning Democracy, Republic, and society.





	1. Choosing Sides

The very foundation of our country was a tug of war between separate societies united under a common Constitution and Government. Which side you were on had everything to do with your own self interest, your own well being, or your sense of community, your sense of identity. In areas like politics, governance, economics, and law, the scientific method really fall apart because you can't quantify and separate anything. There are just too many variable. So without some massive paradigm shift in mathematics, computing power, or otherwise unforeseeable advancement, we can't quantitatively determine which political theory, government architecture, economic model, or set of statutory law is objectively the best. We can only argue from our own position of self-interest and attempt to reach some sort of consensus or compromise. This system of making decisions is as old as man. Usually those with the most powerful made the declarations. However, with the advent of science, another way of looking at things has emerged. Evidenced based decisions. We've gotten a lot better at testing our hypotheses and ferreting out what passes muster and what doesn't. Yes, it's not perfect. Money is way too involved for science to be completely objective and accurate.

Science experiments are expensive to do. When liberal administrations held office, we could count on public funding for science. But as the Democratic party shifts further and further right, science is more privatized now than ever. Corporations are funding experiments. Science isn't being done for pure research, but for profit. And as such, science suffers a bit. However, there are still a lot of scientists who work out of public funded Universities that are doing amazing work. The sellouts don't impact science in general as much because most of their science is locked up in NDA's and patents and it's not publicly available anyway. So let's concentrate on publicly funded science. Publicly funded science is also severely hindered by capitalism. There is a pressure to publish a large quantity of papers in order to keep your research dollars flowing. However, the more you publish, the less rigorous you are in your methods. But that's not the worst of it. The biggest game in science is getting an article published in a science journal. However, Science publications are in the publishing business, not the science business. So they don't require your work to be peer reviewed before accepting your paper. Even worse, is when your paper fails to pass the reproducible test, they are not required to print retractions. As a result other scientists might base an experiment off someone else's paper and get completely wrong results. This is indeed a serious problem.

However, there is a current movement to apply binarism and "sides" to science. There are obstacles to science truly advancing to the next level, and they are mostly because of the undue influence of capitalism on the integrity of the research. But there is nothing "binary" or no sides to pick when it comes to science. So let's ignore the publication journals, because they aren't scientific institutions, they are for profit publishing companies. Instead, let's focus on science itself. What science actually is. Science is not an endeavor to choose between "sides", it's an attempt to learn what actual reality is so we can improve the quality of life and remove its perils. It uses a method of observation, hypothesis, rigorous testing, peer review, more testing, more peer review, until they can move between associations of correlation and prove something with a statistically high percent. P values determine how statistically significant your work is, and the lower values of P mean that your work is less likely to be contaminated by other factors. P values over 0.5 are considered unreliable. Sigma 5, which is the gold standard for most science, has a P value of 3x10-7, or 0.0000003. The threshold for "evidence of a new particle," corresponds to p=0.003, and the standard for "discovery of a new particle" is p=0.0000003. That means that you can run an experiment 3.5 million times and expect it to be contaminated by other factors no more than once.

MIT participates in service that allows anyone to watch videos of some of their college classes for free. In one such video a Physics professor was teaching a class on how to come up with your own physics equations just by knowing the units involved. The particular problem or solution is not important, but what is important is how he quantified them. When he took measurements, he also included how accurate his measuring devices were. He used a ruler, and so since this isn't done with the precision of lasers or whatnot, he assigned a small value for the margin of error as +/- 0.2%. Now think about that for a second. Just that one measurement, of which he did several, had that much margin of error. It doesn't take much of a margin of error to exceeded your p value of 0.5. As such, scientists require extremely accurate measuring devices when working with things like particle physics. Instruments of complexity and precision that even boggle my mind. One such machine is the Large Hadron Collider. In order to go from saying there was evidence of the Higgs Boson particle to there was a discovery of the Higgs Boson particle, they had to account for every single potential for error in measurement and every possible influence of forces that could have resulted in a false positive until they could hit that mark of running the experiment 3.5 million times with only one being influenced by outside corruption of the data. 

Science is not easy work. Science is not glamorous work. What most people think of science is so tremendously far from what it is. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of math. It's a lot of measuring. It's a tremendous amount of double, triple, quadruple checking your work. It's a process for using advanced instrumentation to get closer to the truth. What's important to take away from this is that "binarism" or "taking sides" doesn't apply to science. Yes, it has some challenges. But, if you insist to always search for peer reviews of articles, and find out if they confirmed or retracted the article, you have a much better chance at getting to the truth. And I think that's the biggest difference in this weird dichotomy. Science never claimed to "have the truth". Religion does. Science is searching for the truth using tools we have at our disposal to work towards better understanding the world around us. It's not about adversarial positions. It's about the evidence. It's about how reproducible the experiment is. Ideally, anyone should be able to reproduce any public published science experiment at home. Unfortunately, money is the biggest object. It's easy to think in binary black and white-ism, or us and them. But in reality, the only question that matters when it comes to science is: **can anyone peer review it under ordinary experimental conditions**. If they can, it's science. If not, it's not science. There is no side to be had.


	2. Denial is a river in Egypt

The vast majority of science deniers do not deny all of science, they only deny the parts of science that conflict with their profit, their community identity, or their personal identity. They do not call into question the validity of Newton's First Law of Motion that objects in motion tend to stay in motion. They do not call into question the validity of Newton's Second Law of motion that force is equal to mass times acceleration. You never hear someone ask to "teach the controversy" of crash physics. No one volunteers to drive a half ton car at 90 miles per hour into a solid brick wall because they doubt the validity of Newton's First and Second Law. That doesn't ever happen. It is not in conflict with anyone's profit. It is not in conflict with a community identity. It is not in conflict with a personal identity. So no one questions it. Matter of fact, no science deniers question any law of physics that upon doing a practical experiment to prove the non-validity of said experiment would be the immediate recipient of the Darwin Award.

And that kind of makes sense since survival is a very powerful human motivation. So it can almost be excused. However, science deniers are more in denial about how much they take science for granted. Their lack of science education doesn't make them any less dependent on it, and their inability to understand just how little they understand science and just how much they've benefited from it make their position hard to take seriously. They cherry pick science they disagree with because it conflicts with their profit motive, community identity, or personal identity. But they simply have no idea how much science they actually condone by placing their trust in the resulting technology that came from said science. Technology is the fruit of the tree of science, and without science, we couldn't have technology. Our entire civilization owes its technology advancements to a handful of people that without, we  would have none of the luxuries we have today. All of these tools and luxuries wouldn't exist without science.

We take electricity coming into our homes for granted. But the recognition of electromagnetism as a unified force, is credited to Hans Christian Oersted and Andre-Marie Ampere in 1820. Michael Faraday invented the electric motor in 1821. Georg Ohm mathematically analysed the electrical circuit in 1827. Without these men, we would not have electric powered anything, let alone a national power grid. We'd still be using candles and lamps with oil. The first practical transistor was invented in 1947 by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. Without them, nothing electronic would exist. Your microwave has electronics. Your refrigerator has electronics. Your car has electronics. None of that would exist. Jame Clerk Maxwell developed a unified theory of electromagnetism and predicted radiowaves in the 1870's. A few years lager, physicist Heinrich Hertz applied the theory to producing and receiving radio waves. We wouldn't have radio, television, or satellite technology without Maxwell and Hertz. Nuclear fission was discovered by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann. Nuclear fission was explained theoretically by Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch. Without them, we wouldn't have nuclear power, nor any medical equipment that uses radioactive isotopes such as MRI's, and much, much more.

We owe our entire modern age to these people, and to more like them. None of the technology we have today would exist without these scientists doing science. And yet the science deniers never deny the science that provides the foundation for the creature comforts that they take advantage of every single day. They don't bat an eye at an iPhone working, or internet service working, or car radio, or wifi on an airplane. They don't want to "teach the controversy" in any of these areas. The only time their denials of science is actually applied is in an area that conflicts with their profit motive, community identity motive, or personal identity motive. There is so much science to deny, but if it benefits them, not a single word. They are truly hypocritical and lacking in any intellectual, emotional, and philosophical integrity. There is a group of Christians who are science deniers who are authentic, honorable, and intellectually, emotionally, and philosophically congruent. And that is the Amish. They shun technology as well as science. And if science deniers threw away their technology, no one would care about their science denial. No one would care because they would no longer have a platform, based on the technology of science, from which to spread their malicious bias based on their profit motive, communal identity motive, or personal identity motive. The fact that science deniers use the products of science to propagate their denial of science is why they are so hypocritical, and devoid of integrity and honor.


	3. All About Razors

There is a lot of information on the internet. There is also a lot of misinformation on the internet. People have a tendency to agree with "information" on the internet that agrees with them, whether it's actually true or not. And a lot of people are prone to conspiratorial thinking and distrust of "experts". Part of this has to do with significance and meaning. For some people, it's hard to cope with the fact that there are just things that happen and there is no pattern, no direct cause, no narrative to the events. It just happens. And that unsettles a lot of people. So they are prone to make connections where there are none. And in doing so, they find the "hidden truth" that others don't, which helps them with their craving for significance. And this is a deadly slope because it can lead to all kinds of problems not only for them but for society as a whole. As such, we need to be taught how to think, not what to think. And the best, most concise way to think is using something called Philosophical Razors. In philosophy, a razor is a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to eliminate ("shave off") unlikely explanations for a phenomenon [[[Wikipedia: Razor (philosophy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_\(philosophy\))]].

Occam's razor (also Ockham's razor or Ocham's razor; Latin: lex parsimoniae "law of parsimony") is the problem-solving principle that, when presented with competing hypothetical answers to a problem, one should select the one that makes the fewest assumptions. The idea is attributed to William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), who was an English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, and theologian [[[Wikipedia: Occam's razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor)]] It basically means that your theories need to be backed up with as many facts as possible, and contain as little unverified or unverifiable assertions or assumptions as possible, to be considered a good candidate for a theory. This is important because it helps with conspiratory thinking which always heaps on complications, assumptions, presumptions, and out right imaginings. If you rigorously apply Occam's razor, you can guarantee to protect your theory from conspiratorial thinking, as well as make your argument better justified and more easily testable. And if you're going to be intellectually honest, you want to have the facts on your side. You want to have an argument that is compelling not because you are compelling, but because your argument is compelling all on its own. Occam's razor will help  you with that, and will be a useful tool in deciding what is likely to be the truth and what is likely to not be the truth.

The second razor we will talk about is Grice's razor [[[Wikipedia: Razor (philosophy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_\(philosophy\))]]. It states that as a principle of parsimony (the scientific law dictates that any example of animal behavior should be interpreted at its simplest, most immediate level), conversational implications are to be preferred over semantic context for linguistic explanations. The reason for this is that a person can say and mean one thing conversationally, but semantically someone else could tear apart the argument when that was completely outside of the context of the original argument. It's using semantics to make a straw man argument. In order to avoid that, you adhere to the principle of parsimony, and you take them at their word, as they stated it conversationally. Using semantical strawmen arguments will do nothing for your credibility, and it will do nothing to advance or detract from the theory.

And that goes hand in hand with Hanlon's razor [[[Wikipedia: Hanlon's razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)]]: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. You have no access to the inner motives of other people, and since you don't, you risk ruining your arguments and creating false strawman arguments by attributing emotional content to their argument that might not be there. However, there are plenty of examples of people whose ideas are not well thought out, and it's best to give them the benefit of the doubt that they just don't understand all the concepts.

Hume's razor[[[Wikipedia: Razor (philosophy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_\(philosophy\))]]: "If the cause, assigned for any effect, be not sufficient to produce it, we must either reject that cause, or add to it such qualities as will give it a just proportion to the effect." If your theory can't account for every effect in its system, it's either wrong or incomplete. A fairly simple enough idea, but one people try to fill with conjecture and failing to apply Occam's razor to. It does you no good if you attempt to complete a theory that is missing causal elements with unsubstantiated ideas, it's best to either use Occam's razor to find plausible and verifiable additions, or to just scrap the theory altogether.

Then we have Hitchens' razor: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."  Hitchens's razor is an epistemological razor asserting that the burden of proof regarding the truthfulness of a claim lies with the one who makes the claim, and if this burden is not met, the claim is unfounded, and its opponents need not argue further in order to dismiss it [[[Wikipedia: Hitchens' razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor)]]. This is possibly the most important razor of all when it comes to having a solid foundation for understanding the world around you. There is too much of history of people in power saying something is true and it as accepted because of their status, not because of their evidence. We believe the things our parents tell us. We believe the things our media and politicians tell us (well some of us do). We believe things because of authorities that we judge to be just. But that is folly. We should only believe the evidence. Even the smartest people like Dr. Michio Okkaku and Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson can be wrong. You still look for the evidence. Humans are unreliable sources of information. That is why you always go for the evidence.

And my personal favorite, "Newton's flaming laser sword", also known as "Alder's razor", is a philosophical razor devised by Alder in an essay entitled "Newton's Flaming Laser Sword, Or: Why Mathematicians and Scientists don't like Philosophy but do it anyway" on the conflicting positions of scientists and philosophers on epistemology and knowledge. It can be summarized as "what cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating" [[[Wikipedia: Newton's flaming laser sword](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Alder#Newton's_flaming_laser_sword)]]. This is really important when it comes to scientific inquiry. The moment you put time into debating the untestable, you violate the very principle of razors themselves. You exit the realm of science and firmly plant yourself into speculative fiction. It has no place in science. This is one of the reasons that I am not a fan of String Theory. None of it's "new features" over Quantum Mechanics and Relativity are testable to a Sigma 5 level, so it's not testable in any real practical sense. Let's wait until we have something to test before we proclaim the new Unified Field Theory.

If you consider yourself to be a rational person, these tools will be invaluable to help make sure you actually are being rational. They are invaluable to help you maintain credibility and sharpen your theories. Philosophical razors are there for when you don't have all of the facts, and you need to navigate an unfamiliar ground that lies outside of your expertise. And in that regard, they work wonderfully. They are not a guarantee of "being right", but they are a guarantee of "being rational". And America needs some of that right now.


	4. The Limits of Razors and the Scientific Method

Previously we discussed [[[Newton's Flaming Laser Sword](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Alder#Newton's_flaming_laser_sword)]], and how if something is untestable, it's not worthy of debate. The topics we are engaging in are geared towards having a better set of tools to rationally understand the universe. Science is really good at answering who, what, where, when, and why. Science is absolutely crap at determining ethics, morality, and philosophy. However, there are some people who think that science negates the need for morality, ethics, and philosophy. That movement of thinking is called Scientism. It has its origins in logical positivism, which the Nazi's used as justification for their experimentation on Jewish prisoners. So hopefully it's understandable that Nazi experimentation was a bad thing. In today's climate, you can't take that for granted anymore. So let's look at Scientism from a philosophical stand point. Let's apply the idea of Scientism to blood donation. For the vast majority of people, giving blood doesn't hurt them. For the vast majority of people, their blood is suitable to give. And a lot of people need blood transfusions desperately. So Scientism would call for a mandatory blood donor law, with exceptions having to be medically proved, ignoring the ethics of a person's right to their personage, the legal rights they have being violated from being assailed in this manner, the legal culpability for violating people's rights, and the loss of social capital and the earning of the rage of the populace from instituting such a draconian set of rules. Science just isn't good at making those kinds of determinations and working under those kinds of conditions. But the Scientism movement would tell you that everything can be accurately described and prescribed by Science, and that clearly isn't the case.

Human experience is vastly different than the fundamental properties of the universe. While science is the perfect tool to explore the universe around us, as well as the complexities of the matter inside us, it is horrible when it comes to any aspect of the human experience is completely subjective, non-repeatable, and non-observable. Using science to study human experience systems is doomed to failure because there is no way to get useful data. Scientism has no place in the arts. It has no place in ethics, morality, or philosophy. But it really has no place in race, sexuality, and gender theory. Time and time again, every attempt to apply Scientism to race, sexuality, and gender has resulted in an insulting, accusatory, othering, and hostile framework that was used to harass, abuse, and punish people because of their race, sexuality, and or gender. If anyone attempts to apply a "science" to human experience studies, you can almost guarantee they will come up with racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and/or transphobic rhetoric. Being rational is good. However, over applying science to areas that are not well served by science makes you a sort of fanatic. Ethics, philosophy, and morality exist for a reason.

There is a movement of "atheists" that attempt to use rationality to marginalize women, minorities, homosexuals, and other members of the LGBTQ community. These people are not rational. They are not using their Razors appropriately. They are subscribing to false dichotomies. They are attempting to elevate their superior intellect by denigrating anyone not like them. They subscribe to a religion that white men are singularly rational creatures and everyone else is inferior. They're basically pseudoscience fascists. And they have no place in the rational community. If your rationalism has to put someone else down and declare them inferior to yourself so you can feel superior, you aren't rational, you're delusional and bigoted. And that kind of pseudo-intellectual elitism is at the heart of Scientism. It's not a good look, and you won't be remembered very well by history. As Lin Manuel Miranda wrote in Hamilton, history has its eyes on you.


	5. Mental Agoraphobia

One of the most destructive forms of thoughts that prevent real progress from being made in this country is conspiratorial thinking. We talked briefly about that when we discussed philosophical razors, but we need to talk about it more in depth. Conspiracy theories are not prevalent because humans have basic cognitive malfunctions. Conspiracy theories are so prevalent because we are so good at recognizing patters that for a lot of us, the absence of a pattern is anxiety inducing. It's a form of mental agoraphobia, the suggesting that random unconnected events happen with no causality and no narrative. For some people the need for causality, the need for narrative, the need for a pattern is so extreme that debunking a conspiracy theory feels like you're attacking them at the most core level of their being. And this is quite unfortunate because there are a lot of events in the universe that have no pattern, that have no causality for us to see, and have no narrative. There is a second axis of human behavior that makes conspiracy theories so attractive. The idea of significance. You alone and your people have uncovered the real truth behind these mysterious circumstances and it elevates you into a kind of super intelligent person because those "normies" can't see the patterns you see.

No Fred, we can see the patterns and we realize that they are artifacts of our brain trying to see patterns where they don't exist and that is why we rely on evidence and philosophical razors to help with our mind's tendency to see patterns where they don't exist. In some game and comic shops you used to be able to find a limited edition poster of the first Spiderman movie where he has a helicopter caught in webbing in between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. A conspiracy theorist might make up all kinds of reasons why that posted existed. I don't want to go into it I'm sure you can imagine many scenarios they would come up with. But the actual answer was quite simple. They had the first Spiderman movie almost complete and ready for release when the 9/11 World Trade Center attack happened, and they had to reshoot the entire movie. Conspiracy theory thinking is a natural human thing due to our overactive ability to detect patterns. And it's also one of the reasons we invented science and philosophy, so we could overcome it. Instead of Gods of Lightning throwing down bolts of sonic brilliant death upon us because we were bad, we have people saying we faked the moon landing.

This is not to say there aren't conspiracies in this world. There most definitely are conspiracies in this world. However, in the real world, everything leaves evidence. No one is capable of keeping a global conspiracy quiet because the number of people you'd have to buy off or murder in and of itself would raise questions and a line for investigation. And most of the time, conspiracies boil down to white rich men trying to screw over someone else so they can get more money or more power. One of the biggest conspiracies are about huge clans of people controlling the world interest. But it doesn't make sense for people this rich to try to just screw over the poor, they only have so much money. It's much more likely that this culture of screwing other people over for money extends to each other and that there is no illuminati or new world order there's just a bunch of rich sociopaths trying to one up each other. And that's scary. Because there's no narrative, no pattern, no causality. It's random. And the thought that no one is in control of this mess of a world and that we're just flying through space just flying by the seat of our pants is downright scary to a lot of people. And that's why they gravitate towards conspiracy theories.


End file.
